Human Testing
by The Moonless Night
Summary: A short glimpse into the past of the Avatar program and the perils it entails. In short, the perils of the necessary human testing needed to make an Avatar possible.


**The Moonless Night:** This is just a random thought that hit me while watching this movie and demanded to be written. Read, enjoy, and review. **_grins_**

**Disclaimer:** I do not own, "Avatar". It belongs to its rightful owners and James Cameron, the genius who wrote it. This piece of fanfiction is written for fun and fandom only. I make no money from it and never will.

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** Human Testing**

He stood outside the room, his back pressed against the wall and his head hung low. Rubbing the bridge of his nose in a rare show of frustration, he took a shuddering breath, "Tell the project heads she didn't make it. We'll adjust the calibrations and try again with the beta subject."

A reassuring hand brushed his shoulder, smearing almost-red blood on his white lab coat, "Don't worry, Ken. I'll take the heat for this one. I didn't pay enough attention to her adrenal levels. If I had, we might have avoided this."

The man in the lab coat snorted, "Yeah, and what about the two before her? Is this unobatainium stuff the engineers keep going on about really worth it?"

"They say a kilo of the rock can power the residential domes for a year, so yes," his assistant shrugged, "We just need to get the Avatar program in motion so we can negotiate with Pandora's natives. We don't want another racial war, do we? Remember what happened in Venezuela? That was between members of our own species. I don't want to know what these Na'vi will do if we don't give them a negotiator they can relate to."

Ken shook his head, standing up and pulling his coat straight, "Well, you better go deliver the message then, Sarah. I'll…clean up."

Sarah swallowed hard, "I don't envy you the task. Good luck."

"The same goes to you. Don't let Grace kick you around! Tell her we were close this time, so very close." Sarah gave a weak smile and hurried away down the hall, the fluorescent lights making her appear as pale and used up as Ken felt. With a heavy sigh, the doctor turned and entered the room he had left such a short time before.

Thick boots crunched on broken glass as he entered, ducking his head to avoid a pipe ripped clear of its moorings on the nine foot ceiling. The extra nitrous needed for the would-be avatar still hissed from its innards, prompting the doctor to find the emergency valve on the other side of the room. A side he desperately wished to avoid. Closing his eyes for a moment, Ken took a deep breath and steadied his nerves. They had been close this time. Another moment and the connection would have been complete. What had gone wrong?

Another sigh and he opened his eyes once more, breezing past the broken blue form to his right and the sheet-covered gurney on his left. Finding the valve he needed he spun it twice and listened as silence fell over the room. It felt wrong. This room always held the sounds of life: the steady breaths of Amys, the test subject, training in her capsule; the heartbeat of the avatar in its life-sustaining fluids as it awaited Amys' first connection. Now, there was nothing.

In an effort to combat the silence, Ken strode to the gurney and pulled back the white sheet. Dark hair fell in cascades around Amys' bare shoulders, accentuating the pallor of her face and the sightless gaze of her green eyes. In those eyes, Ken saw her final moments. He saw her synapses arcing wildly across the screen, an adverse reaction to the melding of human mind to alien body.

He watched eyes not her own widen in horror, a four fingered hand rising to clutch at a heart that beat too slowly by human standards beneath blue skin. He relived the horror of watching that heart convulse out of rhythm, trying vainly to match the beat of the human heart that hammered in the chest of the nearby sleeper. What followed was a blur of blue and red, the fury of a brilliant mind shattered in a maelstrom of alien sensations. All of this, Ken saw in those vacant green eyes that stared accusingly up at him.

The lightest of touches closed those eyes for the last time, "I am sorry, Amys. You weren't the first, but I pray you will be the last."

Retrieving his chair from the rubble, Ken strode to the nearest computer consul and set to work. As he typed he muttered softly to himself, "Five fingers, and five toes. The tail becomes an extension of the spine….."

There he remained until Sarah returned several hours later. A young marine entered in her wake, tall and proud with black hair cropped in jarhead fashion. The marine eyed the shambles of the room around him. To his credit, he did not flinch, but instead came forward without preamble, shoving his hand towards the doctor with a wide grin, "Dr. Ken Megumi? My name is, Tommy Sully. It's nice to meet you."

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**Notes:** I'm only assuming the Na'vi breathe some high nitrous mixture because I don't think it was ever mention what exactly they breathe in the movie. (If anyone knows, let me know and I'll change it.) Nitrous Oxide happens to be the only gas I can think of that humans can breathe, but can be deadly in uncontrolled or long exposures. As to the concept behind this fiction, I blame the fact that my brain is always theorizing scenetific possibilities and improbabilities.

Suffice it to say, I find an avatar-like merger highly improbable simply because the human mind isn't made for such things. I do say improbable, not impossible. It would take some really fancy manipulation of one's mind to make something like that work, or at least the core belief that the whole experience is a dream (which the movie implies they do). Otherwise, I see something like this fiction being the most probable outcome and, therefore, likely to have occurred in the movie's past as the avatars were developed.

Anyway.... Now that I have shown my true, geeky nature, let me know what you think of both the story and the theory by leaving a review. Later!


End file.
